Arnie's Greens Stifle Tiger

There is the grand slam and then there is the perfect year. Tiger Woods has been backed with such enthusiasm that his odds are as short as 8-1 to win all four majors - last year he would have been 66-1 or bigger - and there are even those beginning to wonder if he could go a whole year unbeaten. Certainly, his start has been remarkable as he has won his first three events of 2008 - the Buick Invitational, the Dubai Desert Classic and the WGC Accenture Match Play Championship.

Woods' chances of winning his fourth tournament of the year and his seventh on the bounce, however, hang in the balance as a two-under-par 68 in the second round of the Arnold Palmer Invitational in Orlando, Florida, left him seven shots behind the leader Vijay Singh. Disappointingly for Woods, he managed only three birdies during the round, far too often leaving makeable putts short. 'I'll have to play better and make a lot more putts than I have been,' he said. 'I just never got the speed of these things. I kept leaving them short and had a hard time getting to the hole.'

Woods has been critical of the greens despite his illustrious host having done all he could to make sure they were worthy to be set before the great man. 'We did just about everything that the PhDs for the world would tell us to do to conquer the problem,' said Palmer. 'The greens are not, let's say, the top, top of the board, but they are very puttable.'

Woods claims he has not encountered greens so slow since East Lake in Atlanta last September, a tournament he won by eight strokes. 'They were slow, but they were smoother,' said Woods. 'These are slow, and the hard part was that every green had slightly different speeds and I struggled to make the adjustment.'

As a consequence, the perfect year looks likely to suffer a blemish with Singh, the only other man to be world number one this century, nicely placed to leave the stain.

Woods has gone a year without defeat before, but not since he was a pre-teen. 'I peaked when I was 11,' he said remembering the year in which he won every one of the 36 tournaments he played on the California junior circuit.